


Stronger Than Sense

by wordswordswords7



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canadian sorries, Canon Divergent, David Rose Loves Patrick Brewer, Episode: s05e11 Meet the Parents, F/M, M/M, Marcy knows Patrick is gay, Mentioned Stevie Budd - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:54:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27396076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordswordswords7/pseuds/wordswordswords7
Summary: When Johnny lets slip that Patrick and David are dating, the Brewers aren't shocked by that so much as the realization that everyone seems to know what they had assumed is a secret.ORMarcy takes an impromptu road trip and sees something she wasn't expecting.AKA the Marcy Brewer story no one asked for.
Relationships: Clint Brewer/Marcy Brewer, Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 16
Kudos: 286





	Stronger Than Sense

“You know, mixing a business relationship and a romantic relationship...well that’s– it can get kind of tricky sometimes.”

Johnny Rose’s words are not a shock to Marcy. No, she’s known about Patrick and David for quite some time now. Clint has too, for all the worried late-night talks they’ve had—awake in bed and wondering where they went wrong.

No, it’s the fact that David’s father—that this Roland character, a stranger, working at the motel—that _they_ both know about Patrick and David as if it’s common knowledge. Which begs the question, if _they_ can know why hasn’t Patrick told his own parents?

After an awkward back and forth, Marcy and Clint escape to their motel room and stand inside the door in shocked silence. Their bags are still in the car but neither of them moves to bring them in. Eventually, Marcy sits on the edge of the bed. 

Had she been wrong all those months ago? Had she been wrong to think Patrick had been keeping it a secret from _everyone_?

* * *

**7 MONTHS AGO**

Patrick hasn’t called all week, and Marcy is worried that she had crossed a line giving Rachel the name of the strange little town he had disappeared to. It wasn’t her place, she knows, but it was so unlike Patrick to leave the way he’d done, and sometimes a mother’s worry is stronger than her sense... 

As she winds her way down the aisles of the No Frills, she absentmindedly considers leaving him an innocuous text message or two, just to see if he’ll bite. Marcy is deep in thought about this when she turns a corner without so much of a glance and runs right into a familiar face with her grocery cart.

“Marcy! I’m so sorry I didn’t see you there.”

“Rachel, oh sorry dear,” Marcy bends down to pick up the odds and ends that the young woman has dropped. “Oh that was my fault, I just don’t know where my head was at!”

Once the mess is returned to Rachel’s basket, and pleasantries have been traded, Rachel bites her lip and seems to struggle with saying something.

“Marcy...have you or Clint heard from Patrick lately?”

The older woman can’t help but grab Rachel’s hand earnestly. “Did you see him? Did you go?”

“I did,” she replies and there is a sadness there and a finality that speaks volumes. “He’s um...he’s moved on from _us_ , which I think I’m okay with. Or I will be.”

Marcy wants her heart to sink more than it does, for Rachel’s sake. She’s always made a point to be close to Patrick’s girlfriend, his _fiancé_ , because she hoped the stability of that friendship would lend strength to what has always seemed so rocky between the two of them. Now, she feels foolish for it, and not a little as though she’s been standing in Rachel’s corner only to drive Patrick away from his family.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear it,” she pats Rachel’s hand and lets go of it. “But was he– did he seem–?”

The words escape her the moment she has a credible source to ask, but Rachel seems to understand.

“He looked good, really good. But…” She hesitates again and Marcy wants to shake the girl but settles for wringing her hands and waiting. “I think you should call him. I think he could use some of that trademark Marcy Brewer warmth and love right about now, and we both know he’s too stubborn to ask for it.”

Before Marcy can ask why, Rachel smiles a little sad _goodbye_ and disappears down the jams and sauces aisle. If her cart weren’t half-full, Marcy would abandon it altogether to call Patrick then and there. Instead, she finishes up her shopping and waits until the groceries are packed away in the trunk of the car before she dials Patrick’s number.

It goes unanswered. 

She bites her lip, finger hovering over the number to the store. If he doesn’t want to talk to her…

But Rachel’s advice wins out in the end.

“Hello, Rose Apothecary, how can I help you?”

“Hi, sweetheart,” Marcy says, a little too brightly and grimaces.

There is a beat of silence before Patrick responds. “Hey, Mom. Is everything alright?”

“Oh, I just hadn’t heard from you in a while and...well you know how we worry.”

If she baits the hook, will he bite? Will he let _her_ know what it is Rachel seems to think he needs her for?

“Oh, right. Sorry about that, it’s just been a wild...a wild week here.”

In the background, Marcy thinks she hears a woman’s voice.

“Do you carry this wine in a merlot or maybe a free-for-Stevie?”

“Stevie just– give me a second. Mom?”

Marcy can’t help the spark hope that ignites within her. “Big plans, sweetheart?”

“What? Oh, um...not really. Listen, can I call you back? The store is packed right now…”

The only sound she hears is a dry and sarcastic, “Smooth, Brewer.”

But Marcy relents, hoping that maybe a new girlfriend is all Rachel had been hinting at.

Later that night though, while Clint plays solitaire on his tablet beside her in bed and she re-reads the same line of her book for the umpteenth time, Marcy thinks that can’t really be it. Her son wouldn’t be avoiding her, wouldn’t _need_ her over anxieties about a girl, would he?

“I ran into Rachel today.”

She says it simply, a little flatly even. Clint doesn’t look up but his finger hovers over the screen for a small but infinite moment.

“Anything new with her?”

Marcy wants to tell him, but her husband has been the patient one in all of this. The one who keeps telling her to give Patrick his space, even though she knows he’s hurting from their son’s absence too. So she just closes her book and turns off her lamp.

“No, nothing.”

The next morning, while Clint is still asleep, Marcy looks up Schitt’s Creek on her laptop. It’s not so far away, about 5 hours. If she leaves now, she might make it there by lunch and maybe even home again for dinner. It’s a crazy thing to do, she knows this, but she’s feeling desperate. Her only child has never been so distant. Not even when he went away to university and spent four years living in another city. This just feels unbearable in comparison.

So before Clint can wake up and talk her out of it, Marcy leaves him a note saying she’s gone out for a morning hike with the girls and she’s off. He’ll be at work all day, and Marcy isn’t expected anywhere—a timely perk of being a school teacher on summer break. 

She spends the next five hours hoping this isn’t a mistake but has to assume that the clear highway (free of its usual 401 nonsense) is as good an omen as any for the afternoon ahead of her. By the time she gets to Schitt’s Creek she's exhausted and means to stop somewhere to eat and maybe look up where Rose Apothecary is, but there’s so little town to begin with, that she almost drives right past the black antique-looking facade without realising. 

Marcy, suddenly faced with the prospect of facing Patrick, uninvited, baulks. She pulls onto a side street and tries to remember any one of the 50 plans she’d come up with on the way up here. She comes up empty. 

She’s staring ahead of her for a minute before she realizes that she’s looking at the back of Rose Apothecary, and she only knows this because an ancient black Lincoln is pulled up to the back door which _Patrick_ has just opened. Marcy sinks lower into her seat, unsure why really, but unwilling to have him catch her spying.

Is that what she’s doing? _Spying_?

A tall, broad-shouldered young man with striking dark hair unfolds himself from the car and lets his shoulders drop and head fall back, saying something that brings an unfamiliar smile to Patrick’s face. He almost looks...serene. The man must be David, Marcy thinks noting the ripped black jeans worn under a long tunic or skirt, she can’t tell. He’s wearing a black and white sweater despite the heat, and Marcy thinks she remembers Patrick joking about David and his sweaters at one point.

What takes her by surprise—though maybe it shouldn’t—is how openly and nonchalantly David seems to wear his queerness. Like it’s so much a part of him, like an arm or a leg. Marcy wouldn’t normally assume, but it looks so comfortable on David that she wonders why Patrick never mentioned his business partner was gay?

She watches as they exchange a few words (heart aching when Patrick laughs so easily) and then Patrick leaves the doorway to help unload the car, seeming to make a point of loading David’s arms up with boxes first. And Marcy can’t help but smile at the ease with which these two boys, so outwardly different, seem to work together.

And then Patrick steals a kiss.

It’s so small. Such a small thing. He does it like he’s done it a thousand times, hidden at the back entrance to the shop and away from prying eyes. He reaches up to peck David on the lips and then goes in again to press a small, sweet kiss against his neck. 

And Marcy, tears welling in her eyes, realizes exactly why he’s been so closed off and it pains her deeply, but the last few months are beginning to make sense. The conversation with Rachel _makes sense._ Does Patrick think she and Clint won’t accept him? She thinks back through a Rolodex of memories, keen to find the moment that would have implied to him that they were against people for, what? Loving who they love? She comes up empty.

For a moment Marcy can’t wrap her head around it. But then she remembers the Schitt’s Creek sign she drove past only minutes before. She remembers that this is a small southwestern Ontario town, population nothing, surrounded by farms and Mennonite country, and little country chapels. How accepting can Schitt’s Creek really be, after all? Even if David is out, maybe Patrick can’t afford to be. And it seems like it’s either a stretch or the most obvious thing in the world to think that Marcy and Clint don’t know about Patrick because no one knows about Patrick here. And therefore no one knows about Patrick and David. Maybe the business would suffer if the townsfolk knew about their relationship…

Marcy’s pulling at straws now but she can’t think of any other reason Patrick wouldn’t at least tell her and his dad. Unless he’s so mired down by homophobia here, that it’s clouding his perception of what _they_ would think and say.

That _must_ be the reason.

Suddenly, Marcy feels very exposed sitting out here on the street, and very wrong for coming all this way. She’s glad she knows, of course. But now it feels like she’s moments away from accidentally outting her son against his own terms, which feels _wrong_. With shaking hands, she puts the car into reverse and pulls out of the street, away from the shop. 

She and Clint need to have a long talk.

* * *

“David, we’re not upset about Patrick being gay!”

“No,” Clint adds, slightly taken aback by David’s willingness to jump to his son’s defence.

“Oh my god, okay,” David looks up and windmills his hands a little as if to reground himself. ”For a minute I thought this was going to get _very_ dark.”

Marcy watches as David brushes a knuckle to the corner of one eye, clearly trying to contain his worry and relief in front of them. He’d been so brave, she thinks, coming here blindly in the hopes of making them understand. Or maybe of bracing himself for their reactions in order to do a different kind of damage control. She wants to hug the tension out of his shoulders, but she holds back for now. 

And in the ensuing back and forth that clears the air a little, and prepares them for Patrick’s plans to come out later that evening, Marcy can’t help but think of this tall, dark, frenetic boy as the perfect balance to Patrick’s own calm and unassuming nature.

Later when she watches them slow dancing at the party the thought slips into her mind once again. David’s got his arms poured around Patrick’s shoulders like a languid cat, and Patrick—tucked against David’s chest—presses one of those small and quick intimate kisses into David’s neck.

She can’t really explain it, but together they just make so much sense. 

**Author's Note:**

> Might as well add Mom-Angst to the mix.


End file.
